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Simplify Google Maps API with Google Maps jQuery Plugin

The Google Maps jQuery Plugin lets you simply embed Google Maps using The Google Maps JavaScript API in your web pages. While you can use the original Google Maps JavaScript API to do what you need. This plugin attempts to simplify the process to adding maps to a page. To use The Google Maps JavaScript API, you need to first sign up for an API key.

The Google Maps jQuery Plugin is less than 10KB of JavaScript. Portions of the Map (div container, info window) is controlled through CSS, so a user can create their own styles. It has been tested on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 4.

This plugin is a good “wrapper” around the Google Maps API but it doesn’t offer much convience over the GMap API.

I’ve created a jQuery plugin jMapping which allows a developer to map a set of point by extracting metadata from a list of HTML elements that describe the locations. It also allows you to customize those markers and the interaction between the map and the HTML elements:

Here’s my two cents. First of all, using v2 of google maps API is utterly pointless, since it’s deprecated by google.

Second, the net is full on these sort of wrappers like the one in this post and the ones in the comments. But I have yet to see one which has the option to insert address and then have the API convert it to latitude and longitude. I mean, otherwise a lot of the stuff is pretty useless.
Think about it: you’d have to use some sort of converter for it, which makes it hard to use backend (like PHP) to generate sites where there’s dynamic pages and human readalbe addresses.